Economics Journal: What Connects Cellphones and Toilets?

If a household opts to buy a cellphone but not invest in a toilet, does that really reflect a cultural bias against good sanitation? Shown, a roadside public urinal in New Delhi.

A couple of weeks ago, the first set of detailed data from Census 2011, “Houses, Households Amenities and Assets,” were released by the Ministry of Home Affairs. Here’s the good news: In 2011, 63.2% of Indian households had a telephone connection of one type or another. The bulk of these households, 53.2%, didn’t have a landline connection but had one or more cellphones. Indians are more connected than ever before.

The bad news, though, is that 53.1% of households surveyed didn’t have access to toilet facilities. The figure jumps to 67.3% for rural households, who are forced to defecate in the open because they don’t have access to a toilet.

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To me, these two facts were unconnected. Yet newspaper headlines made much of the fact that Indian households are more likely to have a cellphone than access to a toilet. And these weren’t tabloids, these were mainstream dailies.

In a statistical sense, of course, the headlines are correct. What I find problematic is when analysts, commentators, social activists, and even politicians impute a relationship between two facts, so not having a toilet is somehow related to having a cellphone. They often back this up with a cultural argument that sanitation is a low priority for many Indian households.

But is this the most sensible way to look at things? Explaining consumer choices by resorting to cultural explanations rightly deserves very careful scrutiny. The problem is that culture is so vague and amorphous that it can be used to explain almost anything. Cultural explanations often look like rationalizations after the fact, and can be modified accordingly when the facts change.

Examples of this abound. It used to be said that the communitarian, Confucian culture of East Asia would make it impossible for those cultures to embrace Western style economic development. Then, after they took off, it was said that Confucian cultures had in fact allowed them to overcome the failings of purely individualistic, laissez-faire societies like the U.S. or Britain. Later still, after the Asian financial crisis, it was said that their failure to adopt transparent, Anglo-American style financial institutions and governance had led to their troubles. And on it goes.

What does buying a cellphone have to do with not having a toilet? If a household opts to buy a cellphone but not invest in a toilet, does that really reflect a cultural bias against good sanitation? It would be hard to see how one could legitimately draw this inference.

For one thing, a cellphone has a very low infrastructure cost. You don’t even need to live in a fixed and permanent structure to own one. And the maintenance cost is low as well. Once you have bought the hardware, which for the most basic models is only a few dollars, the cost of recharging a prepaid connection can literally be a few cents, depending on your usage. Contrast that to the cost of installing and maintaining a toilet. The average cost of an “improved latrine” (basically a pit with a protective slab around it) ranges between $20 and $40, or anywhere from 5 to 10 times the cost of a basic cellphone. That’s assuming you even have space to install it. For the many millions of people who live in slum dwellings, typically unfinished structures with at most a corrugated metal roof and flimsy walls, there simply would be no place for a toilet.

Are we then to fault someone living under such stark conditions for investing in a cellphone? In fact, it’s well established in development studies that the productivity gain to someone from owning a cellphone can be huge. So, too, of course is sanitation. But given a household’s circumstances, they do what they can, given their budget and living conditions.

There’s a more general point here. The spending patterns of households, whether rich or poor, don’t always match the paternalistic desires of those who’d like to see people spending money on what’s “good for them.”

Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, economics professors at M.I.T., document in their award winning book, “Poor Economics,” that when poor households get some extra money to spend, they might not spend it on food or sanitation, but instead splurge on a television set or a lavish wedding celebration.

And it’s not just the poor who exhibit spending patterns that an outsider might not approve of. A middle class household, whether in India or the U.S. for that matter, might shell out for an expensive meal, fancy sports equipment, or a vacation. By the simple laws of accounting, that’s money they’re not putting towards their own retirement, their healthcare, or their kids’ education.

These choices, whether by the rich or poor, may not make sense to the well-meaning observer, whose reaction might be to decry the harmful effects of consumerism or even globalization on peoples’ spending patterns.

Tempting though it is to second-guess what others choose for themselves, it’s a dangerous game. Equally, it’s tempting, though treacherous, to make tenuous causal connections and invoke culture as a catch-all explanation for what we don’t understand.

Many of my neighbors complain about other neighbors whose domestic help take their dogs for a walk every morning and don’t clean up after them. That leads to filthy sidewalks, as I can attest. But when these people go on to argue that it’s somehow the result of Indian culture – that we keep the inside of our homes spic-and-span, but lack social virtue – I have a problem.

I used to live in Canada, and in my neighborhood, the problem of decaying dog feces on the sidewalk was equally acute (and rancid). Then, one day, the municipal authorities decided to levy a stiff fine and began enforcing the new rule vigorously. The sidewalks cleaned up in a matter of days. It was as simple as having a clear rule and enforcing it which created the right incentive — to clean up after your pet.

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